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Transforming Public Organizations

Systems Oriented Design

The designerly way to work with systems

The main mission of Systems Oriented Design is to build the designers own interpretation and implementation of systems thinking so that systems thinking can fully benefit from design thinking and practice and so that design thinking and practice can fully benefit from systems thinking.

Transforming Public Organizations

 Created: 24 June 2020  Hits: 335

New doctoral thesis by Manuela Aguirre Ulloa This thesis explores how public sec​tor organizations introduce new ways of working, such as co-design methods and mindsets, and examines the interactions between emerging co-designing cultures and dominant public sector cultures. This research contributes to the field of design, with a focus on culture change in public sector organizations.When designers try to create lasting change in the public sector, their aim is not only to co-design meaningful new or improved services, but also to embed the capacity – rather than dependency – of co-design into the organization. Current research suggests that this embedded co-design capacity allows for ongoing transformation.Organizational change can be achieved in various ways, one of which is by facilitating experiential capacity-building programs that immerse public employees in co- designing methods and approaches over the course of several months. In this context, designers often experience that the existing organizational culture strongly constrains the adoption and application of new ways of working. However, many designers are not trained to address this cultural phenomenon.Through a systems oriented design (SOD) approach, two cases of capacity building programs from different countries were analyzed, Fifth Space in Canada and Experimenta in Chile. An integrated research approach combining methods, such as research by design, gigamapping, interviews, and literature mapping was used to get new insights into the complex, contemporary design practice of nurturing and spreading organizational co-design capacities. The analysis of both programs drew my attention to the liminal space between the pre-existing culture in the organization and the emerging culture related to the introduction of new methods and ways of working. While it seemed like these conflicting cultures prohibited lasting innovation, there was also a lack of models and reflective tools to examine these intercultural dynamics.This thesis presents analytical and conceptual models that help to make interactions between the emerging and existing organizational culture more explicit and actionable. First, the Ripppling model provides three analytical dimensions – paradigm, practices, and the physical dimension – to analyze the interactions between the emerging and dominant organizational cultures. This analysis can help to position the emerging culture in a constructive way without alienating the dominant culture, and to enable the co-existence of both for long-lasting transformational change. The Ripppling ecosystem model builds on the micro-interactions analyzed with the Ripppling model and proposes a system of embedded layers for large-scale cultural change processes that can have effects beyond the organization that participates in the capacity-building program.Taken together, the results of this thesis help to explain the difficulties public organizations face when introducing new capacities, such as co- design. My work suggests that these new capacities function as carriers or vehicles of cultural meaning that will inherently generate productive or unproductive tensions with the pre-existing culture. Therefore, one has to carefully recognize and address the underlying interactions across cultures to build organizational transformation strategically and to leverage the full potential of co-designing approaches. This work gives new insights into how to create continuous change in the public sector and has implications for future design practice, research, and education.  Or download the high res thesis verison here Here is the video recording from the dissertation lecturehttps://dchsou11xk84p.cloudfront.net/p/211/sp/21100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/23451094/partner_id/211?iframeembed=true&playerId=kaltura_player_1593018497&entry_id=0_biwyex57

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Transforming Public Organizations

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A loop theory of wisdom – how do we respond to foolish times?

Geoff Mulgan

Geoff Mulgan

A loop theory of wisdom – how do we respond to foolish times?

Is it possible for an organisation, a system or a society, to become wiser? If so, how could we make this real and not just a vague invocation – like wishing people would be kinder or more loving?

In this draft paper (a more developed version of which will be published in a couple of months) I share some answers. I suggest what might be missing in much writing about wisdom and I suggest an alternative framework that cuts across different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, computer science and organisational design.

I argue that progress in this field is badly needed, and not just because of the very visible lack of wisdom amongst many leaders and institutions, but also because rapid progress in use of data and artificial intelligence has not led to obviously wiser actions, in part because these fields lack a coherent view of the relationship between data, knowledge and wisdom.

I also argue that wisdom, and thought about wisdom matters, because it should sit above other types of knowledge, including scientific knowledge, or the insights of particular disciplines or professions.

Wisdom depends on expertise, but sits above it – and, as I argue, this should shape how we design institutions and laws, as well as science advice and governance, the design of digital technologies, and the crucial institutions that help the world make wiser decisions about complex long-term challenges – such as the IPCC and others around climate change, or IPBES concerned with biodiversity and ecosystems.

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The paper challenges some conventional views of this topic which see wisdom as static rather than dynamic, individual rather than collective, introspective rather than involving argument and open learning, and general rather than domain specific.

All of these assumptions may be misleading. I argue that instead of thinking of wisdom as an attribute we should understand it as a series of loops – loops linking thought, action and results; loops involving feedback from others; and loops involving argument and decision.

The paper shows why attempts at definition and taxonomy have been unsatisfactory and why wisdom is not a single thing but rather a shifting assembly of elements linked by what I call integrative judgement, that is in turn guided by reflection on experience. I suggest how institutions could be designed in ways that partly mimic the sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating parts of the individual brain to come closer to a capacity for wisdom.

I present wisdom as an inherently looped concept. I question the idea that wisdom is an attribute of particular people or institutions, presenting it more in terms of processes and actions. What is wise is what in the long run turns out to be wise. We can only truly recognise wisdom in retrospect, or from a distance. Words alone cannot be wise (and putting too much weight on the declarative, verbal side of wisdom opens up greater risks of hypocrisy and error, and greater risks of taking at face value the traditional hierarchical associations of wisdom – age, status, gender etc).

But if wisdom is looped, as I suggest, this also means that it can be learned, whether by individuals or organisations, through habits that partly mirror those of Bayesian inference. Moreover it is possible to address head-on processes that run counter to wisdom –algorithms that circulate lies, media dynamics that tend to amplify attention to people with vivid but misleading ideas, or legal processes that fuel discord.

I also suggest that wisdom is to some extent collective – dependent on others and their feedback – and that it is contextual; we can only judge it from a vantage point. There is no such thing as universal wisdom and wisdom is unstable because the environment that makes up its context is fluid, meaning that what is wise at one point may not be at another point. Wisdom is also looped in another sense. To think wisely we have to learn both to go out, and then to come back: to go out in the sense of exploring other perspectives, ways of seeing and thinking; and to come back in the sense of returning to an action or decision that will always be simpler than the thoughts that guide it.

Drawing on this idea I show how it is possible to cultivate wisdom; to build it into institutions and systems, usually through a division of labour; how to embed it into physical objects and into a further evolution of knowledge management and search tools, as well as artificial intelligence. I also address how wisdom can be cultivated in making sense of new fields of science and technology, bringing with them uncertain risks and benefits.

By making the pursuit of wisdom more explicit with claims, predictions and formal processes that allow for shared reflection and learning, along with a constant iteration of questions and answers, I argue that we can improve the quality of thought not only of individuals but also of organisations and whole systems. By removing some of the mystique surrounding wisdom we can do more to promote it.

None of this would matter if the world was replete with wisdom. But it’s not. Wisdom is fragile, elusive and often undervalued. In a world where data and information have become ever more ubiquitous and cheap, wisdom may have become even rarer.

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I am sharing this (quite long) paper in a draft form in the spirit of its contents – to encourage critical comment and feedback.

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A loop theory of wisdom – how do we respond to foolish times?

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Why Complexity should be Embraced for Transparency – Phoensight – Medium

Why Complexity should be Embraced for Transparency

Audrey Lobo-PuloFollowingJun 25 · 6 min read

Every policymaker’s manual has some fine print on‘complexity’ — and if you’re lucky, you might find a chapter or two about it. There’s an unspoken reluctance to open the Pandora’s box on complexity to the wider public. Why? There may be a multitude of reasons on the checklist, but you’ll find ‘explainability’ featuring strongly in there somewhere — like a prickly cactus no one wants to touch.

The nature of complexity means that it’s difficult to end up at a pre-determined outcome by following a prescribed path — assuming that outcome even solves the problem you’re working with. Yet, in a world where countries aspire to provide more transparency in government complexity is often side-stepped or hidden behind a series of political slogans, announcements, action plans or reduced to tables, charts, dashboards and fancy infographics — or worse, cited as a reason for a lack of transparency!

Now, don’t get me wrong — there have been many successful action plans, and visual representations have been invaluable in helping people better understand and explore information. But if we take a step back to the issues of concern, there are many questions that need to be asked at the outset — “How have the issues been framed?”, “How do we determine what information is relevant?” and “How does the way we scope a problem affect the solution?” amongst others.

And this is where the ‘taming’ of the complexity is actually taking place…

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Why Complexity should be Embraced for Transparency – Phoensight – Medium

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Health systems science proving vital during pandemic response | American Medical Association

JUN 25, 2020

Brendan Murphy

News Writer

American Medical Association

Full Bio

For half a decade, the AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium has worked to make health systems science (HSS)—the study of how care is delivered, how health care professionals work together to deliver that care, and how the health system can improve patient care and health care delivery—a vital part of the medical school curriculum. Touted as the third pillar of medical education, HSS domains have been effective tools in fighting against the COVID-19 outbreak. A new chapter in a recently released second edition of Health Systems Science, a textbook featuring contributions from faculty members within the AMA consortium, outlines how these practices are best utilized during a pandemic.

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Health systems science proving vital during pandemic response | American Medical Association